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Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is the high priest of Gonzo journalism, a
reporting style in which the reporter throws himself wildly into the event he
is reporting, so that in a way he becomes the event. Karl Lazlo (not his real
name) was a Mexican-American attorney Thompson met in the late 1960s and
immortalized in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book in which, "speaking
as your attorney," Lazlo regularly advised his client to ingest large quantities
of booze, drugs and pills. The purpose: to ward off paranoia and insanity as
the two engaged on a drunken odyssey through the craziness of the Vegas Strip.

The
Vegas book was followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, in which
Thompson terrorized the 1972 presidential campaign as a correspondent for
Rolling Stone. His mere presence was enough to cause terror in the hearts of
advance men. The last appearance - or rather disappearance - of Lazlo in
Thompson's writing is in "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," a
1976 Rolling Stone article in which the doctor speculates that his attorney has
disappeared for good and been murdered.

"Where
the Buffalo Roam" is a comedy inspired by the relationship between
Thompson (Bill Murray) and Lazlo (Peter Boyle). The credits say it's
"based on the twisted legend of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson." The doctor
has become an American folk legend not only through his increasingly infrequent
and incoherent Rolling Stone articles, but also through his frequent walk-ons
(as Raoul Duke) in the comic strip Doonesbury. We know his uniform: eyeshade,
cigarette holder, garish Hawaiian shirt, bermuda, shorts, bottle of Wild Turkey
or similar beverage.

In
Doonesbury, the character fights crisis with paranoia. In real life, Thompson
has proven no more immune to the effects of alcohol and drug addiction than
anybody else, and lives in isolation in his cabin In Woody Creek, Colo., where
he has written almost nothing worth reading since his original brilliant books.
He seems to be spending these latter days of his fame having almost as much fun
as Brendan Behan did.

But
"Where the Buffalo Roam" is a celebration of the self-created public
legend of Hunter Thompson, with no insights, or hints into the dark night of
his soul. That's a legitimate approach, and there are times during the movie
when it works: There are really funny moments here, as when we learn that
Thompson's dog has been trained to go berserk at the mention of Nixon, or when
Thompson covers the Super Bowl by staging a football game in his hotel suite,
or when he pulls a gun on a telephone, or turns a hospital room into an orgy,
or attempts to impersonate a correspondent from the Washington Post. An amazing
number of these scenes are inspired by real life - although it was Sen. George
McGovern, not Richard Nixon, who found himself being interviewed by Thompson
while standing at a urinal.

We
laugh at a lot of these moments; this is the kind of bad movie that's almost
worth seeing. But there are large things wrong with "Where the Buffalo
Roam." One of them is its depiction of the relationship between Thompson and
Lazlo. That's what the movie is supposed to be about, and yet we never discover
why these two characters like one another. What is their relationship, aside
from the coincidence that they happen to get stoned or drunk together in
bizarre circumstances? Are they even really friends? Because the movie's
central relationship just isn't there, the events don't matter so much: We get
bizarre episodes but no insights.

The
other problem is that the Dr. Thompson character never seems to really feel the
effects of the chemicals he hurls so recklessly at his system. Murray plays
Thompson well but in a mostly one-level performance: He walks through the most
insane situations with a quizzical monotone, a gift for understatement, a
drug-induced trance. Any real person drinking and drugging like Thompson would
have an occasional high, and a more than occasional disastrous low. Here he has
neither.

And
so the movie fails to deal convincingly with either Thompson's addictions or
with his friendship with Lazlo. It becomes just a series of set pieces,
oft-told tales about the wild and crazy things he's done while he was zonked.
We wish him well, but we leave the theater wondering, a little cynically, if
Thompson has had as much fun destroying himself as we've had watching him.

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